Things My Father Told Me When I Was Young

Contributed by Matthew Hartwell on 29/10/08

He knows he should be heading home. The light is failing. He glances up through the branches at the sky. His mother will be worried sick.

His father is dead.

It was during the cold autumn, when his people had been hungry. Their game had fled for hills that had more nourishment. But these hills were hunted by other men, men it would not be wise to war on. To the south, though, the people ate well. They ate little meat, and farmed the more open land they had been given by Hushtahli.

They were the soft men.

His father had not lead the party, but he was among those who went. Blessed with axe and spear, his father had stolen the speed of a deer before courting the boy’s mother, or so she had told the boy.

He had taken note of the ashen look on his father’s face as the other men boasted of the ease with which they had taken the food and lives of the soft men of the south. The largest one told his tale of killing the son of their hopaii. He laughed as he described how the boy had been clutching something to his breast as he ran, and the man, hoping for something precious, chased the boy down, as if he were merely more game. After driving a spear through the boy, he turned him over, to find he was holding a small fox, whimpering, to his breast. Disappointed the fox was not glass or bronze, the man said, he took its head in his massive palm and crushed it.

The boy’s father had not seemed surprised when the giant did not return from hunting the next full moon. While the giant’s widow and their baby wept, one for grief and one for hunger, the boy watched his father talk to their hopaii.

Before the next hunt, his father dug a square pit under his bed. The boy’s mother pleaded with his father not to go, but already, what had been taken was low, and more food was needed. The other men seemed less worried. The boy’s father dropped the bones of a mouse in the square pit.

The concern on their faces was real enough when they returned in the morning, less one man. The boy’s father dropped the bones of two birds in the square pit, so the grave would not demand a greater fulfillment.

After the next full moon, the boy’s father returned, with one other man. The other two had been with the war-party, and had now not come home from less dangerous sport. The father called the boy by the fire.

He told his son of the beast. How it stalked by moonlight. How he had thrown a spear at it, and how that spear had passed right through the monstrous figure as if it were a shadow of a dream. He told his son of the beasts white-tipped tail, and how its fur was as red as blood. As red as its eyes.

The bloody-eyed fox.

The next month, his father left again, this time dropping no bones in the pit. The men who went with him had not been a part of the raid, as those men were gone now, save one. When they returned, their faces were ashen, and they jumped at the cracks of wood in the fire. Not a man of them ever again slept through the night peacefully until the day they died. The boy’s father had not come back with them.

He has been waiting for a month now. The moon had waned and waxed again, and was almost pregnant. He carries with him his father’s axe, left hanging over the cook-pot. He has thrown a fox’s bones into the square pit beneath his father’s house and bed.

He will face the fox tonight, and in the morning, there will be one set of tracks leading away.